Translation

My grade two teacher, my best friend and my mother would all confirm I have never been speechless, but lately I’ve been thinking about how to talk to people.

The fact is, most of us know how to talk to our neighbour in the next yard or cubicle about our kids, the weather, the movie we saw last week, but we don’t know how to communicate what we care about most – God.

Lately, everyone I know seems to be reading a book called Blue Like Jazz. What makes the author, Donald Miller, unusual and popular is that he has developed ways to talk about his relationship with Jesus Christ in the most natural of ways.

For example, one of his friends was struggling to believe in God and Miller described watching a documentary about penguin behaviour and how it helped him understand why he believed in God.

”I know it sounds crazy,” he writes, “but as I watched I felt like I was one of those penguins. They have this radar inside them that told them when and where to go and . . . they show up on the very day their babies are being born . . . I have a radar inside me that says to believe in Jesus.”

Miller advises his friend to read through the Gospels. A few days later, she e-mails him that she has become a Christian.

It makes me sad that this ability to communicate faith using the ordinary stuff of our lives is so unusual. We should all be finding ways to talk about God.

Author and pastor Brian McLaren said recently, as reported in the Herald, that asking people to become a Christian is like asking them to become an Aztec or a Viking. My kids know about Aztecs and Vikings because of a simple set of children’s books where the main characters travel through time and space to solve mysteries that teach them (and the readers) much about the civilizations they visit.

Our job as believers is similar to the role played by those children’s books. We are to take people to places they may never have been, offering guided tours of lives that show our citizenship in a heavenly country, as well as being prepared to give some commentary on what it’s all about.

I think we recognize, rightly, that people in our neighbourhoods have no idea what Christian faith is all about, but this does not excuse us from the Great Commission, to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:18–20). Living in a largely post-Christian culture means that we need to become translators of God to the culture.

More than being acquainted with the culture itself, we need to learn how to communicate our faith in ways that connect with the people around us. That means knowing the desires of the human heart and how they manifest themselves in our culture – a need for love, a need for acceptance, a need for significance, a need for belonging – and thoroughly knowing what we believe so that we can move beyond the shorthand we use in church.

What does redemption look like to someone who is completely unchurched? What is communion all about? What is sanctification? These are not technical concepts, important only to seminarians. Instead, they are words we have put around the life-giving message of the gospel; they are the keys that unlock the needs of every human heart.

People of all ages and faiths can grasp significant concepts, put into their own context. My very favourite part of parenting is introducing my kids to the world, coming up with ways to help them grasp a concept, using or building on their experience.

I recently heard a fable about how virtues used to be embodied. When Truth came into the village, she was shunned, people were afraid of her, but when Story arrived, the people sat for hours listening to him, enjoying the tales. So Truth asked Story to borrow his mantle, and the people were able to receive Truth for the first time.

Stories and books can help us begin the translation process. A lot of what I do in writing fiction is to translate how God acts in the lives of people into stories. I’m excited about the launch of my first novel, but am also seeing it as something God can use as kindling for conversations that might never happen without a story.

Think back to your own life story: if you’ve ever been in love, you’ll remember how much you wanted to do little things that made your beloved smile. As we fall in love with Jesus, we want to do things that delight Him. One of the best ways we can love Jesus is to love what – or whom – He loves, by finding ways to translate between our neighbours and the God who loves them.

Susan Fish attends Kitchener (Ont.) MB Church. Her novella, Seeker of Stars (Winding Trail Press) has just been released.